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Friday, July 30, 2010

We did this with the Science Fiction Masterworks and this Fantasy version was knacked specifically from the Mad Hatter. The standard instructions for memes like this is to bold books one has read, italicize books one owns but hasn't read yet, and strikethrough books one violently disagrees with.

The Book of the New Sun, Volume 1: Shadow and Claw - Gene Wolfe

Time and the Gods - Lord Dunsany

The Worm Ouroboros - E.R. Eddison

Tales of the Dying Earth - Jack Vance

Little, Big - John Crowley (I hated this book, but understand many, many people adore it)

The Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny

Viriconium - M. John Harrison (It isn’t so much that I didn’t like the book, I just felt very meh towards it and don’t get why it is held in such reverence)

The Conan Chronicles, Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle - Robert E. Howard (Read in the Del Rey reprints of the Wandering Star volumes)

… when the two editors are known as a couple of the best in the business currently, you would expect a healthy selection of the best tales from the best.

The nature of story collections is that there are bound to be stories that you like better than others. Usually though I can say whether I liked the collection or not. Silverberg’s Legends, for example, published in 1998, and its sequel Legends II (2003) had the same intent as this, to showcase the best Fantasy and had some unusual yet interesting choices that made me read more of some authors I had not read.

Here, with the same aim, there were no authors I had not encountered before and all of whom previously I would’ve said were good, but the overriding cumulative impression in the end here is much less positive.

When this book first arrived, I wasn’t sure what to think of it. Two blurbs on the book; however, immediately impressed me – Brian K. Vaughan and Frank Quietly, two modern comic creator greats – which gave me the impetus to try the book. As soon as I started reading the first page, I was unable to put it down until I finished it. The narrative immediately drew me in and Wilson’s art was perfectly suited for the tale, both the style and color tone used. Though the art is neither black and white nor full color, a muted sepia tone is employed lending a nice aged, authentic, and historical feel to the story told.

A series about which Mark and I agree is Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files and Mark jumped into the latest book in the series, The Fuller Memorandum, and gave his thoughts:

… For those who are not aware, Bob’s an IT technician who over the length of the series has become a bit more than your usual computer fixer-upper. By Book 3 he’s married to Mo (Doctor Domanique O’Brien, if you like) and a key operative under the stern, watchful eye of his mentor, Angleton....After dealing with Nazis and megalomaniacs in previous tales (not to mention concrete cows in Milton Keynes) this time Bob’s involved with the Russians. As a result, we’re dealt secret London Underground Tube stations, equally labyrinthine corridors of bureaucracy, administrative red tape galore, zombie servants (though they’re called Residual Human Resources here), a great dollop of the Laundry’s past history and a wealth of deliberately silly codenames, from TEAPOT to CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. It’s not just codenames - the ubiquitous iPhone gets a look in too, albeit renamed the JesusPhone, obviously for its arrival being seen as the Second Coming.

Lastly, Mark reviewed what he think isn’t just “yet another vampire novel,” The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan:

… In this season of vampires, there’s a lot to choose from. From the Twilight series to Anita Blake, from Justin Cronin’s The Passage to.... well, this would be a pretty good alternative.

The tale hits the ground running with the arrival of Flight 753 in New York. All seems well, but on landing the plane suddenly goes dark. Covert observations show dead passengers sat in their seats with no signs of stress or trauma. There are seemingly no survivors, neither passengers or crew....This is a fast paced blockbuster of a novel that starts fast and maintains the pace pretty much throughout. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Guillermo (director of Pan’s Labyrinth, Chronos and Hellboy I and II) brings a dynamic filmic quality to the book, though this is more than a bloated film script.

Friday, July 23, 2010

This meme has been making the rounds on teh intarwebby-blog-a-ma-jigs. What better way to keep a blog alive than a meme, especially when (a) it shows of some of your geek cred {or lack thereof} and (b) you aren't participating in the group blog from which this meme originates.

The standard instructions for memes like this is to bold books one has read, italicize books one owns but hasn't read yet, and strike through books one violently disagrees with.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Here's the haul from this week, books left at the garage or in my mailbox.

Pictured above: Grimblades by Nick Kyme (Warhammer Fantasy), Nemesis by James Swallow (Warhammer 40,000), and The Bird and the River by Kage Baker.

Pictured Above: Divine Misdemeanors (Meredith Gentry) by Laurell K. Hamilton (Third copy I've received), Frostbitten (Otherworld) by Kelley Armstrong, City of Ghosts by Stacia Kane, The Ocean Dark by Jack Rogan, As Lie the Dead (Dreg City, Book 2) by Kelly Meding, and The Chamber of Ten by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon.

Pictured above: Mass Effect: Retribution by Drew Karpyshyn, A Princess of Landover by Terry Brooks, Tempting Fireby Sydney Croft, Wolf's Cross by S.A. Swann, Penny Arcade 6 by Jerry Holkins, and Mike Krahulik, Dragongirl by Todd McCaffrey, The War That Came Early: West and East by Harry Turtledove, and Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

It’s been a while since I posted here, with vacation and another thing or two taking up my time. One of which was catch up at work after vacation and the other can be seen at the bottom of this post.

As for my latest review, it is of a modern classic of the genre. Or, at the very least, part of one of the modern classic Science Fiction series. That series is Iain M. Banks’s The Culture and the book is The Player of Games

As the title would indicate, Gurgeh is a renowned game player in the Culture and he is offered a chance to compete at what is considered a very complex game that defines a society not part of the Culture itself – the Azad. Azad is the name of the game and the society. The background here is that the Culture doesn’t make its presence known to planets or societies that don’t have sufficiently advanced technology, which happens to be the case with Azad. The Culture wishes to use Gurgeh to get a feel for the civilization of Azad and whether or not Azad is a threat or potential ally. Fluffing out that straightforward plot is the complexity of how Gurgeh was ‘recruited’ by the Culture to infiltrate Azad.

Mark/Hobbit asked, after I bounced him the review for a once-over before I posted it to SFFWorld, if I was less enthralled because the book was 20+ years old and was perhaps dated. I don’t think so, because I didn’t find the plot entirely enthralling and even the description didn’t light off all my bells before reading it. That said, what I’ve read of Banks I really enjoyed so I felt it necessary to read the book, and I want to make my way through the entire The Culture saga. Specifically, I do want to jump into Use of Weapons as I’ve heard/seen/read great things about the book.

As for the other reason my blogging and net life has been less active? We’ll the o’ Stuff household has grown a bit in the past week as we adopted a puppy last week. Her name is Sully, after the lead singer of our favorite band Godsmack. Yeah we know Sully of Godsmack is a man our dog is a girl, but she won’t know the difference. Her mother is Great Pyrenees and the rescue organization from whom we adopted her thinks the father was a Labrador Retriever. Of course, most places will default to the Lab since the breed is so loved and the most popular breed. Regardless, Sully is active, curious, very smart, fun, and can be a bit of a handful. Then again, she’s a puppy so that’s to be expected.

I'll still be posting links to SFFWorld reviews. I may continue my Books in the Mail posts, they are more time consuming to post than one would expect, so maybe I'll just add highlights of rather than the entire weekly haul. I hope my millions of readers like dogs, because I'll probably continue to post pictures of the crazy four-legged ball of fur.